So you want to be a games journalist?

Once upon a time there was a little boy who loved fire engines. He loved fire engines so much that barely a second went by without him thinking about them; about what it would be like to drive one, to hear one, to touch one. Even to taste one. He’d never tasted a fire engine. One day, one day.

He loved them. He loved the shiny red metal, the silver steel ladders, the way the lights rushed round and round with such thrilling urgency. At school he spent whole lunchtimes flicking through fire engine magazines, articles dripping with anticipation about the latest hoses and newest ladders. At weekends he went out to take pictures of the engines, sneaking shots as they roared towards some exciting disaster. And then, back at school on Monday, he passed well-thumbed prints to all his friends and watched them coo with delight too.

He was 4 years old, and 6, and 8, and all that time his parents thought it was just a phase, but the boy knew that he’d never grow tired of loving those fantastic metal dragons, as red as the rosiest apple, as shiny as the day they’d been unwrapped. And he was right; as the boy grew older the teenage world offered other delights, fighting and fucking, but his thoughts never once wavered from those beautiful engines. He was 10, 12, 15 and suddenly other people didn’t seem interested in his engines, and the photos weren’t so well-thumbed at school — in fact, When he tried showing them off, the people he used to call friends laughed and hit him a bit — but it didn’t change how the boy behaved. He still dreamt of the day he could spend all his time with fire engines.

The day came: the day of his graduation from university, a 2:1 in English Literature his reward for three years of half-hearted studying careful fire engine devotion.

“Hurray!” the boy cheered, internally, “Now I am free of the education system which has kept me blissfully directionless! It’s time for me to work with fire engines for the rest of my life. I’ll become a fireman!”

The walk from his house to the station felt heavy with the future. The knock on the metal fire department door rung loud and true, a clang heralding that sumptuous, certain future, a creak as it swung open.

“Hello!” said the boy. “I want to be a fireman because I love fire engines!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said the tall, jolly, handsome chief of the fire department, stifling a giggle, shaking his head. “You are fat and pasty, and you cannot walk up a flight of stairs without finding yourself somewhat out of breath. You cannot be a fireman!”

The boy left, dejected, and cried himself to sleep that night, cradling his favourite plush engine in his arms, its rouge fur moistened by his tiny tears. That was it, forever. His dreams were dashed. What could he do now?

He awoke with the answer. He’d become an engineer, and make and design fire engines. Simple!

His early-morning phonecall to the city’s engine design department was answered by a gruff man who sounded like he had a moustache and a belly. This, surely, would be his new boss!

“Hello!” said the boy. “I want to design fire engines because I love fire engines!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said the engine deisgner, curtailing the boy’s dreams with a dismissive grunt. “Stop wasting my time. You need years of training to do what I do. This job is about graft, not fetishism.” And he hung up.

The boy crawled back to bed, heart emptied, all colour drained away. There was no answer. He fondled the plush toy gently, stroked the little pipe-cleaner hose lovingly, tweaked the rubber light on the top of the cab. Even that couldn’t lift his spirits. He was doomed to a life without fire engines, an existence rooted in the mundane, like all the stupid, boring nine-to-fivers.

The next morning, he had a better idea. He’d become a fire engine critic!

Why? Better to ask why not! What career could be better suited to the boy? He knew everything there was to know about fire engines! No-one understood them like he did. He was king of fire engine forum discussion. He was fireengineking@hotmail.com, for Lord’s sake. And so he spent the rest of the day writing and rewriting the most important letter he’d ever write: a letter to the biggest fire engine review magazine there was.

“Dear Engine Extreme,” the finished letter read. “I love fire engines! I really love them! And while I have no interest in journalism, and I admit that my writing ability is limited to piling hateful cliché on dimwitted observation, and I have dubious personal hygiene and social skills that have been described by my peers as ‘inept, bordering on the psychotic’, I really fucking love fire engines! Seriously!”

“Love from the boy,” it finished. “(Who loves fire engines!)” he added as an afterthought, sealing the envelope and kissing it for good luck.

He didn’t have to wait long. Two days later a reply arrived, and the boy ripped it open with feverish excitement.

“Dear boy,” said the letter. “I’ll be honest with you. As long as you’re prepared to write barely disguised advertorial for fire engine manufacturers, directed at an audience so focussed on the future they don’t notice how many times they’ve been ripped off in the present, partially thanks to your repugnant lies. As long as you can live on salary that isn’t so much slightly insulting as flat-out financial rape, while we justify it by shrugging our shoulders and claiming it’s the market rate, which we define, and while you justify it to yourself by ignoring the hideous hours and immoral working practices and telling your brain you’ve got the greatest job in the world. As long as you don’t mind writing words that don’t mean anything for an audience that never fucking reads them anyway, and completely losing sight of the reason you came here in the first place.”

“As long as you can do all that,” the letter continued, “Then, hey, you’re hired.”

“Sweet!” said the boy, jumping in the air and clicking his heels. “Fire Engines all day long, forever!”

And so, for a while, things were great. Each day was filled with engines and new friends, people just like him. Sure, the engines didn’t seem as exotic in the second week, and by the third week that ruby red colour that had always set his heart aflame seemed to have lost some of its magical lustre, but his colleagues told him that was to be expected. Maybe it was all the diagrams of how they were made, maybe it was the previews of next year’s fire engines that just seemed like the last, maybe it was the realisation that, while millions of people loved fire engines too, the vast majority of his audience — the people who liked to read about them, who dripped saliva over ever morsel of information about futuristic fire-dousing equipment — were dysfunctional teenagers who’d latched onto the future as a means of escaping the present.

Or maybe it was just that modern fire engines didn’t have the same appeal of the old ones. Like the batch of engines he had to review this week.

“Red?!” scoffed the boy to himself, “Have these fellows ever thought of a little concept called ORIGINALITY?”

But though the bitterness bubbled up in his throat, the acid burning his tongue and choking him a little, he wrote a lovely review that gave the engine 8/10 and praised its reliance on long standing engine values.

“Wailing sirens!” spewed the boy to himself, “Oh, be still my beating heart. What a surprise!”

But though the sadness welled up from the pit of his stomach and swamped his brain with nostalgia, he wrote a glowing appraisal that gave the engine 8/10 and thanked the manufacturer for continuing to live up to their excellent self-set standards.

But though he could feel his heart being pulled into pieces by the tiny, unstoppable tweezers of reality, dreams and hope plucked from torn and tattered ventricles, he wrote an enthusiastic piece on the performance of the fire engine, including a section which compared their magical movement to that of a famous ballet dancer whose name the boy had Googled to give his argument weight, and gave it 8/10.

Years wore on, and life was as easy, lonely and tragic as a coma. The boy began to feel ashamed of the engines he once loved; one day one of the Fire Journalists claimed the boy was part of a movement called New Fire Journalism, and that was really great especially since all the boy had done was write about how he once had a wank over a burning girl. But mostly his life felt empty and directionless and bereft of any value or weight whatsoever.

He thought about getting out, but how? Sure, some people had made the leap from writing about fire engines to writing real words about real things — but they weren’t just boys who loved fire engines. They were boys who loved to write, first of all, and had started to write about fire engines because sometimes fire engines were interesting and beautiful, even though most of the rest of the time they were boring, repetitive objects built to serve a single function, and identical to a million fire engines past and future. And when those boys had nothing more to say about fire engines, they stopped and moved on.

They were boys with talent, that was the thing; not just an unhinged passion for a generally adolescent subject and a willingness to sacrifice every single principle if it meant getting to work on the periphery of that subject for a little while longer, but boys who wrote words that people would pay to read. They could move elsewhere; those trying to use passion as a substitute for ability couldn’t. But why would the boy want to, anyway? He loved fire engines. He loved fire engines. He loved fire engines…?

Didn’t he? He couldn’t remember.

Then one day he burned to death, fat and alone, because he had no idea how to put out a fucking fire.

THE END

Note: This post is The Triforce‘s part of the Official “So you want to be a games journalist?” blog project. Others:

He could always have done a degree in Fire Engineering. Then he could have made fire engines, and realised that, actually, writing about them is much more fun than spending 3 years making a fire engine before realising it’s a bit shit at putting out fires, what with fires being so hot and everything, and getting a shit review in Official Fire Engine Magazine and starting work on pitching some next-gen fire engines that probably won’t put out fires either.

I go to a college where they offer one of those tendy “game design” degrees, and of course more than half of the students in that major are the children of filthy rich parents who think they’re on the path to an easy, fun job. I’m tempted to print your article out and post it on the main bulletin board in the ITGM hallway and see how many dreams it will break.

Lets be fair, writing about videogames isn’t exactly difficult, anyone who is clever knows what games are good (the ones that say Nintendo on them) and what games are bad (the ones that say EA on them), so your job is basically making that clear to retards. And yet Fifa still outsells Pro Evo, For sooth, so its no wonder you become disillusioned.

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